Tech firms fear trade deal loss of freedomThis from Audrey Young at the Herald. I am almost¬†convinced that the TPP can only be good for innovation. Bring it on:Don Christie of IT company Catalyst is among those who have pitched a case to the negotiating countries.His aim is to avoid having the trade deal strengthen patent rights in the IT industry for fear of stifling innovation and increasing the legal risk of doing business on the internet.

Christie has nothing to fear from the TPP. All he has to do, to avoid litigation, is avoid being a a copycat asshat and ¬†reusing another’s patented software thereby¬†opening one’s company wide open to patent litigation.

It is worth noting that as a proponent of the open source environment, Christie is against patents. Fullstop. His business inhabits an open source environment which relies on the free exchange of software processes. Of course he lobbies against patent protection. If he invented something worth patenting, he might have a different opinion.Some patents are daft and open source information exchange is all well and good until one asks the question, “where does one get the money to pay wages and investors”?You’d be very lucky to get investors for new software in a patent unprotected environment. Any idea that was deemed worthy of development would be able to be immediately copied. So why bother inventing new software.¬†Christie has got it arse about face. If NZ’s patenting environment isn’t protected, the larger companies can cherry pick the software that they like without fear of litigation. The Googles and Apples of the world can assume any processes developed by the New Zealand minnows without fear of retribution.

“If you think of what’s happening with Kim Dotcom, it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the Americans are demanding.”

It’s a different kettle of fish entirely. Kim Dotcom is being investigated as to how much knowledge he had of illegal traffic within his Megaupload file sharing business.¬†

“The software industry in New Zealand persuaded all political parties to support the exclusion of software from the Patents Bill, which had languished in Parliament for several years”.

The bill has languished because it is nigh on impossible to exclude software from the Patents bill. We live in a world governed by software from the delivery of our entertainment to our banking encounters. Different parts of the software industry have different opinions on the Patents Bill. Not all are “agin”.

The current status is that software is patentable only if it has a real and measurable effect in the real world.¬†This prevents the egregious ¬†¬†Amazon 1 Click patent¬†phenomenon.

A free exchange of ideas is commendable. Discussion can lead to further innovation. In software it is particularly useful for purposes of peer review and fixing bugs. However, if you don’t have patents, you don’t have investment, jobs or a revenue stream. it’s all very well, standing around and singing Kumbaya in an open source environment but it won’t necessarily turn you into the next Microsoft.